Schneier on Security has a great piece about the New York woman who allowed her 9-year old son to ride the subway alone. He concludes:
I am reminded of this great graphic depicting childhood independence diminishing over four generations.
Indeed. It prompted me to fire up Google Earth to measure how independent I was at that age. I can’t remember age 9 exactly, but I can bracket it:
By age 8, I would routinely:
- Walk or take the bus to school (1 mile)
- Walk to the library (1.1 miles)
- Walk or cycle to Gladstone park (1.4 miles)
- Walk or cycle to Cricklewood Broadway to go shopping (1.1 miles)
Around the same age, I rode my bike with a friend to Marble Arch (4.8 miles), but I think I got into some trouble for that. By age 10, I would routinely take the bus and/or tube to:
- Paddington Station (4.8 miles)
- Waterloo Station (7.8 miles)
- Kew Gardens (8.6 miles)
I remember being jealous of my cousin, Clive, because he lived at the top of a hill just outside Huddersfield, and (so I imagined) he was free to range over the Yorkshire Moors.
My theory is that just as humans have ancient, deep-seated intuitions about physics, causality, psychology, and time, so we have an inbuilt sense of probability: of assessing risk and chance. All of these things were “baked in” by evolution when we were living in small, nomadic groups; we can see some hints of them in the behaviours of the other primates. And just as our “folk psychology” and “folk physics” break down dramatically when confronted with the scale of the modern world, so our “folk probability” is quite hopeless at assessing true risk in a world of global communications. Couple this to the fundamental shift in the Western attitude towards death that took place during the first half of the 20th century – from inevitability to avoidability – and parental paranoia is understandable. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to overcome it. After all, “folk psychology” attributed most mental disorders to demonic possession, and we’re only now shaking that superstition off.